This article will investigate the Barcelona School in relation to the vicissitudes of European leftist cultures of the 1960s, and in particular the intersection of critical theory with the political avant gardes. Joachin Jordá, for instance, cites the influence of Roland Barthes on his film Dante no es únicamente severo (1967), and several members of the Italian Gruppo 63 including Umberto Eco visited Barcelona in the same year to take part in a conference on engaged art. But if we can trace the influences of European leftist thought on the Barcelona School filmmakers, we should also consider a reciprocal move. For although the School’s films found it hard to travel outside Spain, we find in the movement a crucial exemplar of the European avant gardes’s aesthetic and political impurity. Peter Wollen famously chararacterizes two avant gardes, with the European version eschewing formal rigor for political engagement. The Barcelona School certainly lacks stylistic cohesion, but it has also been criticized as apolitical. This article argues that the School demonstrates a crucial aspect of the European avant gardes undervalued in Wollen’s influential model: by promiscuously combining forms, it speaks to (and from) the contested territories of European film culture. Unlike the New American Cinema, the European avant gardes of the 1960s emerged from radically diverse political situations (Francoism, Titoism, state socialism, liberal democracy etc.). Theoretical debates on Marxism and culture linked the project of engaged cinema to the contested direction of the European left. And avant-guardist forms mixed uneasily with art cinema, exploitation genres and the global claims of Third Cinema. It is this rich mulch that accounts for the incoherence but also the complexity of the European avant gardes. The Barcelona School demonstrates the importance of the transnational to any understanding of European avant garde film cultures
